Free Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler

you again my brain said,
Why are you watching this guy? Who is he? Why this guy and not other guys, any other one?
because there was something wrong with the picture I was in. It was like an apple running for Congress, a bike rack wearing a bathing suit. I was cut and pasted wrong into a background you could immediately—or, anyway, after fifteen minutes—see didn’t match up, was how I felt. Like Deanie Francis in
Midnight Is Near
or Anthony Burn as Stonewall Jackson in
Not on My Watch
, wrong for the part, ill cast. My backpack, I wondered—with homework and the Robert Colson book I’d loaned Al that he’d finally given back added to the weightheavy against my legs—would I have to take it with me for the loud night looming obvious ahead of us since the score had tipped overwhelmingly ahead? What to do with this pennant and its plastic stick to hold it, do you throw them in the fire, why did nobody ever have a pennant at a party? What was I, wrong, doing here in the gym, never a voluntary place for me? They didn’t even sell coffee and I wanted one, boy, did I want one then, ready to bash the exhausted mom and snatch her thermos of it. But there was no way to escape, out the windows too high and not even open, crumbs and walnuts at my feet, Christian’s brother leaning against me accidentally, Joan laughing with someone’s mom on the other side. You don’t leave; you stay. I thought I was keeping quiet, but gradually my throat was hoarse and hot from all my yelling. I spaced out and came to, caught you pointing at me again and hoped I hadn’t missed other times, you smiling up to find me only to see me scowling, bored, and eyes elsewhere. I tried, I tried again, waving my flag like a hostage. I gave you my spirit and you won.
    The score was a billion to six, and no surprise. Everyone on earth would never starve and forever find love and happiness, since we won, but if we’d lost, they would have gouged out our eyes and thrown us naked onto hot coals and poisonous snakes for all the cheering and hugging at the end, strangers hugging like the end of
The Omega Virus
when Steve Sturmine finds the antidote. The biggest onesfor you, Ed, realizing as you victory-lapped that I should have bought flowers and hidden them someplace to shower them down upon you, now that the Beavers had won and, according to everybody but the boredom-stricken arty girl in the reserved seats who was fat from too many biscotti, saved the entire human race. I’m sorry—then I was sorry, but not now—but it was boring to me. “Not too late!” Joan reminded me as we crowded out, waving to her car as I waited for you to come out excited and clean, my brave boy with a new girlfriend, happy with your teammates. But it
was
too late. I had to stay and I stayed, knowing, understanding, liking none of it. Not until the other girlfriends slipped the pennant off the stick did I know to toss mine into the trash with the others. Then I rolled up my flag while they rolled up theirs, agreeing it was a good game, a fun time, a perfectly acceptable thing to do with my Friday night. I waited for you, Ed, to make it all worthwhile, and when you kissed me and said “I told you you’d like it,” that was the only part I liked. But I just kissed you, too, and let you hoist my backpack with yours onto your beautiful shoulders and walked next to you, my fingers sweaty on the scroll of the pennant, not knowing where to put my hands as we grouped up in the parking lot to carpool to Cerrity Park. What else could I do? There was no choice, as far as I could think. You won the game, we won the game, the party afterward, the drinking, the big blaze, and finally alone someplace too late, I had nochoice, not from the moment I first saw this flag fly. I had no choice. We weren’t going to sneak off to the movies instead, just talk anywhere, someplace else. Not the co-captain, not that night, not with me the new girlfriend, and that’s why we broke up.

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